Multilevel Fixed and Sequential Acceptance Sampling: The R Package MFSAS

Multilevel acceptance sampling for attributes is used to decide whether a lot from an incoming shipment or outgoing production is accepted or rejected when the product has multiple levels of product quality or multiple types of (mutually exclusive) possible defects. This paper describes a package which provides the tools to create, evaluate, plot, and display the acceptance sampling plans for such lots for both fixed and sequential sampling. The functions for calculating cumulative probabilities for several common multivariate distributions (which are needed in the package) are provided as well.

A DISTRIBUTED LEDGER SOLUTION FOR MANAGEMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY TEST DATA

Psychology tests are widely used in mental health diagnoses, education assessments, and recruitment assessments. There are several major problems in using the traditional way to manage psychology test data. First, there is no single source of truth for psychology test data due to centralized storage. Second, the data are mutable and have the risk of a single point of failure. Third, people have very weak or no control of their own data. This thesis explores the possibility of adopting the new distributed ledger technology, represented by blockchain, to address the problems. The relevant literature of blockchain and psychology tests was reviewed. A complete academic solution was proposed. It includes a permissioned blockchain, a no-SQL database, a web service, and a front-end. The blockchain stores user profile, metadata of psychology tests, final test scores, and access control data of the tests and test scores. The no-SQL database stores test materials and raw test results. The web service interacts with the blockchain and the no-SQL database. The front-end interacts with the web service. The solution was implemented, and the performance was evaluated. The evaluation results showed that the Post request is slower than the Get request and as the number of clients grows linearly, the latency of the requests grows linearly. The slower latency for the Post request compared to the Get request reflects the time it takes for the blockchain system to write information and change the common ledger status. The solution proposed here provides a new way to manage psychology test data with satisfactory performance. Future research can focus on extending the current solution to other questionnaire data management and to non-questionnaire-based psychology assessment data management

Eighteen Language Teaching Techniques: A Report on a Chinese Tutorial

This is a report on an experience of tutoring Mandarin Chinese for 28 hours. The report consists of a description and discussion of 18 techniques used in the tutorial. Each technique is discussed in terms of the following: Objectives--what the student is expected to learn from the technique; Rationale--the reasons for using that particular technique to meet the objectives; Procedure-­ a description of the activities used in class; Comments--an evaluation of the effectiveness of the technique and ideas for follow up or expansion; Implications for teaching—the applicability to language teaching in general. The techniques are geared to helping the student learn the four skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing

Multilevel Fixed and Sequential Acceptance Sampling: The R Package MFSAS

Multilevel acceptance sampling for attributes is used to decide whether a lot from an incoming shipment or outgoing production is accepted or rejected when the product has multiple levels of product quality or multiple types of (mutually exclusive) possible defects. This paper describes a package which provides the tools to create, evaluate, plot, and display the acceptance sampling plans for such lots for both fixed and sequential sampling. The functions for calculating cumulative probabilities for several common multivariate distributions (which are needed in the package) are provided as well

Technology as Enabler of Learner Autonomy and Authentic Learning in Chinese Language Acquisition: A Case Study in Higher Education

Based on the Constructivist approach, meaningful learning only occurs when learners have agency to construct meaning through social interactions. The ability to self-direct, communicate, collaborate, and transfer learning to real-life situations are crucial skills for the 21st century. These skills allow new generations to adapt to this new information era in any field and/or disciplines they pursue; foreign language acquisition is not an exception. In this article, the authors argue that language learning can help learners cultivate such abilities with the aid of a holistic curriculum design and the effective use of technology. The authors also explore how using tools, such as Google MyMaps, WordPress, and Adobe Spark, in a semester-long “Food Project” may promote learner autonomy and authentic learning, as well as improve the acquisition of 21st century skills. Technology-based curricular strategies, work progression, and student feedback are presented in the article. Through qualitative analysis, the authors conclude that by focusing on authentic learning and learner autonomy using instructional scaffolding students can enhance linguistic literacy, create a sense of ownership, sharpen cultural awareness, transform interdisciplinary skills, and establish a supportive learning community in the process. 摘要: 建构主义学派认为，学习是学习者透过社会文化互动，将知识 经验内化并从中建构意义的过程。在二十一世纪的信息时代中，自主 学习、沟通合作、知识迁移和转化都是在各个领域中不可或缺的素养。 作者认为，这些技能不但在语言学习中扮演重要角色，另一方面，完 善的课程设计和有效的科技应用亦能加强这些能力的培养。本文介绍 如何将“食物与文化”的课程设计与科技媒体相互搭配，以提高中文学 习过程中的自主性和真实性。透过质性分析，从学生的表现和反馈中 可以看出，支架式教学设计以及多媒体工具的辅助能有效提升学生的 语言能力，提高学生的学习自主权和文化敏感度，并提升跨领域和知 识转移的能力，同时在学习过程中建立起相互支持的学习社

Comments on Five Smart Card Based Password Authentication Protocols

In this paper, we use the ten security requirements proposed by Liao et al. for a smart card based authentication protocol to examine five recent work in this area. After analyses, we found that the protocols of Juang et al.'s , Hsiang et al.'s, Kim et al.'s, and Li et al.'s all suffer from offline password guessing attack if the smart card is lost, and the protocol of Xu et al.'s is subjected to an insider impersonation attack.Comment: 4 pages

Preventive Effects of Dendrobium candidum Wall ex Lindl. on the formation of Lung Metastases in BALB/c Mice Injected with 26-M3.1 Colon Carcinoma Cells

Dendrobium candidum Wall ex Lindl. (D. candidum) is a traditional Chinese medicine widely used in Asia. The present study has showed that D. candidum exerted an anti-metastatic effect in mice injected with 26-M3.1 colon carcinoma cells. D. candidum showed the most marked tumor inhibitory rate of 64.5% at a dose of 400 mg/kg body weight (b.w). The mRNA and protein expression of Bax in lung tissue of D. candidum-treated mice was shown to be higher as compared with control mice, whereas the mRNA and protein expression of Bcl-2 showed the opposite trend. Decreased mRNA and protein expression of MMP and increased expression of TIMPs was demonstrated in lung tissues by quantitative polymerase chain reaction and western blot assays. D. candidum reduced the serum cytokine levels of IL-6, IL-12, TNF-α and IFN-γ to a greater extent as compared with the control mice, and administration of 400 mg/kg b.w. resulted in a lower serum cytokine levels as compared with mice treated with 200 mg/kg b.w. Eleven compounds were in the D. candidum leaf, of which the functional contents may help to generate novel treatments for the prevention of lung metastases. The results of the present study have demonstrated that D. candidum had a potent in vivo antitumor and anti-metastatic effect in BALB/c mice injected with 26-M3.1 cells

Automated Vessel Segmentation Using Infinite Perimeter Active Contour Model with Hybrid Region Information with Application to Retinal Images

Automated detection of blood vessel structures is becoming of crucial interest for better management of vascular disease. In this paper, we propose a new infinite active contour model that uses hybrid region information of the image to approach this problem. More specifically, an infinite perimeter regularizer, provided by using L 2 Lebesgue measure of the γ-neighborhood of boundaries, allows for better detection of small oscillatory (branching) structures than the traditional models based on the length of a feature's boundaries (i.e., H 1 Hausdorff measure). Moreover, for better general segmentation performance, the proposed model takes the advantage of using different types of region information, such as the combination of intensity information and local phase based enhancement map. The local phase based enhancement map is used for its superiority in preserving vessel edges while the given image intensity information will guarantee a correct feature's segmentation. We evaluate the performance of the proposed model by applying it to three public retinal image datasets (two datasets of color fundus photography and one fluorescein angiography dataset). The proposed model outperforms its competitors when compared with other widely used unsupervised and supervised methods. For example, the sensitivity (0.742), specificity (0.982) and accuracy (0.954) achieved on the DRIVE dataset are very close to those of the second observer's annotations